They could have named this game many things. I Am Bored. I Am Frustrated. I Am A Terrible Video Game. Any of those would’ve sufficed.

I Am Alive has the pleasure of becoming the first game I’ve thrown into the fire without completing first. It just isn’t worth the time and effort. I’ve played some bad games in the past, but this one takes the taco.

The setup is cool, I will admit. You play as some dude making a trek back home to find his family after a natural disaster lays waste to what we can only assume is the entire country. Bullets and resources are scarce, most people are scared or hostile, and every little tiny damn thing you do makes you tired. Especially climbing, which they make you do a lot of. Climbing, jumping, running, etc. all require stamina, which drains at a frighteningly quick rate. If you run out of stamina while climbing, you’ll fall to your death. While mid-climb you can drink soda or water, or eat fruit cocktails and such to regain stamina, or you can use a piton (a stake like what mountain climbers use) to “rest” mid-climb. It’s the resting I find laughable, as you are still hanging from your arms on the side of a building. What about this is any different from what you’re already doing is beyond me. Even perched on a make-shift ladder of sorts, made from rebar or whatnot, uses a silly amount of stamina. Why can’t that be used to “rest?” What grown man can’t stand on a ladder for longer than 15 seconds without plummeting to his death?

I get what they were going for, but it just doesn’t work. Imagine all the climbing of the Uncharted or Tomb Raider series, but if you don’t get where you’re going in less than a minute, Lara and Nate die horribly. They took what could’ve been a cool game and sucked all the fun out of it with a useless “survival” mechanic.

At least the graphics are good enough to keep you entertai–oh, who am I kidding? The “dust” that covers everything gives the game every shade of beige you can imagine. Apparently the earthquake shook all the paint off of everything as well.

The combat is a whole different level of bullshit. I had multiple encounters with groups of people, and the single survivor here or there will point a weapon at you and threaten you to stay back, at which point you usually do because it’s not worth your time to attack anyone. The groups of… we’ll call them bandits, are less optional. The player has no choice but to confront these ruffians, which should create for a tense moment of quick strategic thinking. Only it always seemed to play out the same way; In a group of four, wait till one gets close enough, do a quick kill, pull out your gun and aim it at the other guy with the gun (because there’s always another guy with a gun), shoot him, and then try to run toward him and grab his gun before the others get to it. Then it’s a matter of shooting one of remaining two bandits, then do a mashy button quick time event to kill the last guy. This sounds like a cool, James Bourne-Jackie Chan-Bruce Willis situation, but it’s really not. One hit from any of them during this struggle and you’re pretty much done. It leads to far more deaths than victories..

Which leads me to my last frustration with the game. The “retry” system. Rather than a checkpoint system, the game will save every so often at the completion of certain tasks, then create checkpoints in between. If the player dies, which I did often, it will use up one of your set number of retries. You can find more retries sprinkled throughout the game, but if you run out, you’ll have to reload a previous save and go through the tedium all over again. Which is bullshit. 90% of player deaths will be due to either fighting the clunky controls, trying to figure out where you’re supposed to go next while dangling from a ledge, or getting killed by the terrible combat.

In other words, the game punishes you for it being a shitty game.

As I’m typing this, I have I Am Alive paused. The screen I’m looking at has me at 22% completion after 1 hour, 38 minutes of gameplay. That’s how long it took me to say, “Fuck this.” Maybe I’ll come back to it one day.

Or maybe I’ll just go play The Last of Us.